by Barry Lyga
Worse yet, of course, was that Billy had told Jazz a lot about his victims. Those stories became twisted bedtime yarns told to Jazz each night: The Sad Story of the Girl Who Tried to Get Away. The Guy Who Stopped Too Soon. The Woman with the Knife Who Didn’t Use It. These tales and more—over a hundred of them—jam-packed Jazz’s childhood brain like a sick volume of fairy tales. Only the pages had been shredded and then taped back together in some random, haphazard way, such that Jazz could recall a welter of vile images, conjure a lifetime’s worth of gore and sickness, but most of it without context. A psychiatrist who had examined him during his brief stay with Social Services had diagnosed him with a peculiar variety of post-traumatic stress disorder. He could remember finding human teeth in his father’s nightstand at the age of seven, for example, but he couldn’t remember where those teeth had come from. All he remembered was finding the teeth and—with a child’s innocence—playing with them like dice, not even realizing there was anything wrong with it, as though he could visit a friend’s house and find the same thing in a random cupboard or drawer.
Furthermore, Billy hadn’t given him all the details of his kills, particularly when it came to the deeper sexual aspects of his murderous compulsions. Make no mistake—Billy Dent did not merely kill his victims. He tormented them. Tortured them. Raped them and abused them. But he had his own notions of what Jazz needed to know. For some things, he claimed, Jazz needed no guidance: “You have to figure out what works for you, son. You have to find your own way.”
News magazines and cable TV channels deluged him regularly with offers to tell “his story,” to offer “his side” to the world. But Jazz didn’t have a “side.” He just had a seriously messed-up childhood and a tossed salad of memories that wouldn’t help anyone.
“I can’t do anything for you, Mr. Fulton. I really can’t.”
“Just one question. Please. Do you need money? I can give you money. Not much, but—”
“Stop it, Mr. Fulton! Please.” He couldn’t even look at the pathetic sight; he stared into the rearview mirror, hoping someone would pull up and honk him into action, but the side street remained empty.
“The police report said she was gagged,” Fulton said, now returned to a standing position, leaning into the window so far that Jazz could feel the man’s breath on his neck. “But the coroner thinks the gag had to have been removed before she died. So I’m just asking, please, did your father…Did your father ever tell you her last words? I just want to know.”
Oh, God.
Jazz shut his eyes tight. Was this man insane? Did he have any idea—any idea at all—what the likely answer to that question was? That the odds favored her last words being something like Ohgodpleasenojesuspleasenonononoooooooooo!
“I can’t help you,” he whispered. It was the truth: He had no idea what Harriet Klein’s last words were, and he wasn’t about to guess.
“Did he keep any kind of a journal or anything? Something you kept from the police, maybe? I promise you—I promise on my daughter’s grave—I won’t tell anyone. I just want to look. To see.”
Jazz took a deep breath and slowly blew it out. He turned to Fulton, whose eyes had become more sunken, whose face had become more creased. “Mr. Fulton, I can’t help you. Please leave me alone. I’m going to hit the gas now, so please step back.”
With a whimper of defeat, Fulton stepped back. Just as Jazz rolled the window up, though, he said one last thing, one thing that cut into Jazz like an Arctic wind: “Didn’t you ever lose anything?” Fulton spat, his voice full of anguish and spite. “Someone who mattered? Even a pet? Didn’t you ever care?”
Jazz slammed down on the gas and took off down the road.
The memory of Fulton’s voice and enraged eyes spun and whirled in the confines of the Jeep as Jazz drove. Didn’t you ever care? Didn’t you ever care?
I care! Jazz thought fiercely. I care!
He cared so much that at first he’d considered getting in touch with as many victims as possible. Maybe setting up some kind of charity or fund, where he could be the figurehead and attract contributions that way. Do some sort of good deed to prove to himself and the world that he wasn’t a monster waiting to happen.
But Billy had done good deeds all the time. So had John Wayne Gacy, and dozens of others. It didn’t matter. It was all part of the disguise. Jazz realized that he couldn’t trust even his noblest impulses. They might not be genuine. They might just be camouflage.
Even the one truly good thing he’d done in his life—rescuing Howie from those bullies all those years ago—was tainted. Billy had been outraged when the parents of the bullies complained to him about their kids’ injuries: “You shoulda just killed ’em, son. We could have gotten rid of the bodies and then I wouldn’t have to deal with this. Kill ’em and dump ’em. But no. You had to go and beat them up and make them go cry to their mommies, so now I gotta go and put on my civilized face and pacify these witches.”
And there were the urges. The feelings. The memories. The things that he’d been taught and then forgotten, but that lurked somewhere in his brain’s basement, ready to strike like stalkers in the night. The Social Services shrink had told Jazz to be prepared, to be on guard for “emergent memories”—memories thought forgotten that could, unbidden, resurface at any time, without warning.
If memories could resurface…couldn’t other things, too? Needs? Drives? Desires?
Urges?
Technically, seventeen was too young to diagnose someone as a sociopath. Psychiatrists liked to wait until eighteen to make the diagnosis, so in a technical sense it was impossible for Jazz to be one. But he knew there was no magical switch that would be thrown on his eighteenth birthday to determine who and what he was. Age didn’t matter—a kid named Craig Price had started a serial killing career at the age of thirteen. Thirteen years old and he was out there murdering, with a lot less preparation than Jazz had.
The dice had already been tossed, the cards shuffled and drawn. He was what he was, whether he knew it yet or not. Maybe he was just a guy with a crazy dad, like other kids with crazy dads.
Or maybe he was something else.
CHAPTER 12
He knew he should go home—Gramma would be waiting—but Fulton had put ideas in his head that made him feel poisonous. Radioactive. He couldn’t abide the nearness of other people just then, so instead he peeled off from town and headed for the Hideout.
One of the benefits of growing up in a small town in the middle of nowhere that had seen its best days decades ago, Jazz had learned, was that there was a lot of abandoned property to be taken advantage of. This was, he admitted, something he’d learned from Billy. After all, Billy had killed two natives of Lobo’s Nod and managed to stay out of G. William’s sights for six months before the sheriff finally added up the right columns and arrived at the inescapable conclusions that led him to the Dent house. Billy was no stranger to the lost byways and forgotten vistas of the Nod, and he’d taught his son their importance.
Jazz had stumbled upon the Hideout—an old, ramshackle moonshining hut from the looks of it, eighty years old if it was a day—a year earlier. Through good fortune, it sat in a copse of neglected spruce and pine, so it was hidden year-round even though it wasn’t more than a quarter of a mile from the nearest road. It struck him as a good place to be alone and to think, so he’d made some desultory repairs and declared it his own private hideaway. Since he didn’t have a cell phone, it was as isolated as he could get without hitching a dogsled and making for the North Pole.
About six months ago, he’d come to the frightening realization that this was pretty much textbook serial killer behavior. “LESSON ONE: FIND A RUN-DOWN OLD SHACK OUT IN THE WOODS WHERE YOU CAN PLAN YOUR CRIMES AND BRING YOUR VICTIMS WITHOUT ANYONE KNOWING.”
So he’d told Connie about it, and she occasionally joined him there, which made him feel a little less…Billy.
He made a beeline for it now, needing to be alone. Inside, he didn’t bother
to turn on the lanterns or even to pull back the makeshift window blind, preferring instead to sit in the dark. The Hideout wasn’t any bigger than ten feet to a side, its walls rough stone tarred over in an effort to keep out the rain and the bugs. Jazz had hauled in a pair of old barstools and a beanbag chair last summer, and now he flopped down on the latter.
He flipped open his wallet. Flipped past the picture of Connie, past the photo from the school carnival last month, Howie draping his mile-long arms over Connie’s and Jazz’s shoulders. They all smiled at the camera, and it shocked Jazz every time he saw himself happy.
The only other picture in the wallet was of his mother.
Yeah, Mr. Fulton. Yeah, I’ve lost someone. Yeah, I’ve cared.
This was the original—the one on his bedroom wall in the eighty-third position was a blown-up copy. After Mom had gone away/disappeared/vanished/been murdered, Billy had ransacked the house, gathering up every trace of her and burning it all in a massive bonfire. This picture, which Jazz had kept tucked under his pillow as a child, had survived. It was all he had.
Sociopaths don’t care about anyone but themselves, or so the literature says. So if he cared about his mother (or her memory, at least), and if he cared about Connie and Howie, then didn’t that mean…?
But no. It wasn’t that simple. Sociopaths could have pets and treat them quite well. They could even be married and carry on a facsimile of an emotional relationship. (Serial killers also tended to be pack rats, something Jazz tried not to think about when he considered the old junk piled around the Hideout.)
The question for Jazz was this: Did he really care for Connie and Howie, or did he just think he did? It was the oldest philosophical question in the book—how do I know that what I see as blue and what you see as blue are the same thing?
Answer: We don’t. We take it on faith.
Would a true sociopath worry about things like this—if the caring was real? And then worry about the worrying about it? He didn’t have an answer, but he also knew that sociopaths worried about all kinds of things. Billy had been obsessed with keeping his lawn neatly trimmed, convinced that the entire town of Lobo’s Nod was gossiping about him if the grass became at all unruly. Why the man who’d killed one hundred and twenty-four innocents should care about small-town gossip, Jazz didn’t know. But that didn’t stop Billy.
Jazz sat on the beanbag chair, staring at the photo for more than an hour, time passing without his awareness. A sound outside made him jump up just in time to see Connie inch open the door and peer in.
“I thought you’d be here,” she said.
“Still angry?” he asked as she came in.
“No.” She hugged him. “Forgiven.”
“But not forgotten.”
“I don’t forget anything. Don’t know how.”
He nodded. Fair enough. “I just wanted to help the cops. I still think it’s a serial killer. G. William is wrong. And more people are going to die.”
“It’s not your job to take care of that. It’s his. Let him do it. What is that?” she asked, backing away as Jazz’s wallet—still out and in his hand—poked at her.
“Nothing. Just—”
She took it from him again and it fell open to the picture of his mother. Connie fixed him with her most withering stare.
He relented, not because of the stare, but because it was just easier. He told her about the second meeting with Fulton. “And it just made me think of…things,” he finished lamely.
“What things?” By now they had both sunk into the beanbag chair, Connie curled into his lap, her head resting on his chest. Her hair tickled his nose. He felt himself respond to her weight in his lap the only way a teen boy should respond.
“You know. The usual things.”
And then, for some reason he couldn’t name, he told her something he’d never told her before. He told her about the dream, the nightmare. The knife. The voices.
Most girls, Jazz knew, would have been creeped out. Creeped right out the door, in fact. Right out of his life. Connie just squeezed his hand tight and gazed at him steadily.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s a dream.”
“I have it all the time.”
“The way you grew up, I’m surprised it’s that tame.”
He hesitated, then told her what really worried him. “What if it’s not just a dream?”
She looked at him blankly.
“I mean…” His jaw tightened, but he went on. “I mean, what if I’m dreaming about something that actually happened?”
“Jazz…”
“What if my father actually put a knife in my hand? What if he took it out of the sink—”
“Jazz…”
“—and put it in my hand and made me—”
“Jazz, it didn’t—”
“—made me cut someone, told me it was like cutting chicken, and made me—”
“Stop doing this to yourself. Stop it.”
But he couldn’t. He’d held it back too long, and now it wouldn’t stop gushing. He’d nicked some sort of memory artery and the blood was spraying everywhere.
“What if it was my mother? What if that was her voice, and he made me cut my own mother? Made me kill—”
“Stop it!” She took his face in her hands. “Stop it. That did not happen, do you hear me? It didn’t.”
Miserably, he said, “Then how do I know what it feels like? In the dream, I know what it feels like to cut someone. If I’ve never done it, how could I know what it feels like so that I could dream it?”
Connie’s eyes darted back and forth as she thought. Then she said, “People dream about stuff they’ve never done all the time. Like flying. Or having sex with a supermodel. Or driving a race car, or whatever. Maybe it’s like the voice says. Maybe it’s just like cutting chicken. You’re just thinking of that, is all.”
It destroyed him to kill the hope in her eyes. But he said, “I don’t think that’s it, Con.”
“And if it’s not? If you did cut someone?” She kissed him suddenly. Hard. Savagely. As if her lips could drive out the demons. Jazz let himself be swept away by it. Connie was safe. She was safe. She wasn’t like the other girls. She was safe because—
“If you did cut someone,” she went on, “it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t because you wanted to. Someone made you. Billy made you. It wasn’t your idea. You’re not a psychopath.”
“Sociopath. There’s a difference.”
“My apologies, mon. I did not mean to offend,” she said in her best Tituba accent, one eyebrow arched.
He laughed in spite of himself; she could always make him laugh. But the mood lasted only seconds. Even if he turned out not to be a stone-cold killer like Dear Old Dad, he still was a guy with a brain-load of problems. One day she would get tired of him, grow sick of those problems, and leave him. So what was the point in—
She broke in as if she could read his mind: “Did you think when we met that I didn’t know who you were? Just because I was new to town? Did you think I had no clue? I knew who you were when we first met. I knew who you were the first time we kissed. And it’s not stopping me, and it’s not going to stop me.” She adjusted herself in his lap, grinding her butt into his groin in that special pleasant/painful way only the right girl’s butt can grind.
Connie is safe.…
“The more you obsess over things, the worse they get. Let it all out. Let it all go.” She made magical fairy dust–sprinkling gestures with her long, elegant fingers.
“It’s not that easy.”
“You know what you should do?”
“Don’t say it.”
“You should go see your father.”
God. “Didn’t I just say not to say it?”
She locked eyes with him. “Listen to me: It’s a good idea. That guy Fulton, he wants closure, right? You can’t give it to him. But it’s the right idea. And Billy can give you your closure. For the things he made you do as a kid. The things you saw.”
He dumped her off his lap as gently as he could; he’d already gone numb enough that he wasn’t even hard anymore. “You don’t get it,” he said, walking to the Hideout’s only window. There was no glass, just a sheet of scratched-up, milky-fogged plastic Jazz had staple-gunned in place. He squinted, peering through it as best he could at the trees beyond that sheltered this little oasis from the rest of the world.
“Billy doesn’t give closure. That’s not his thing. He only started doling out details about his victims because his lawyers convinced him that was the only way to avoid the death penalty, and there’s nothing more important in this world to Billy Dent than, well, Billy Dent. He’s not taking a lethal injection for anyone. But he’s not going to apologize to me for what he did, or anything like that. He isn’t wired that way.”
“He doesn’t have to apologize.” She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around him. “Just telling him how he’s affected you—”
“No way.” Jazz shivered at the thought of it. “The last thing you want in this world is to show weakness to him. Never. I can never go see him. Just doing it would give him the upper hand. You show any weakness to a serial killer and they live inside you after that.”
“He’s already living inside you,” she whispered in a tone of regret. “Because you can’t let go.”
“Let go?” He exploded, spinning around. Connie jumped back. “Let go? He killed my mother!”
“You don’t know that. Not for sure.”
“Oh, I know it. One day she was there. The next day: Poof. Gone. And all of her stuff: Gone. Pictures: Gone. Like she never existed. He erased her, Con. Like she was a mistake on a notepad. That’s all she was to him. Poof.”
“They would have found—”